How to: Embed a tweet in WordPress

Ever seen people quoting tweets in a fancy manner within their blog posts or articles and wondered how it’s done? Â If you’re a self hosted WordPress user then it’s easier than you might imagine. I’ve tried a few different solutions but the one that I had the most success with isÂ Blackbird Pie. Let’s take a quick look at it in action:

Provide either the URL of the desired tweet or the ID of said tweet then hit the insert button

When you then publish your content, WordPress will convert the inserted bit ofÂ short-codeÂ into a pretty quoted tweet. Â It’s that simple.

There are, of course, pitfalls with any solution. I’ve had a couple of occasions, like when I wrote my post “Looking back to New Years Resolutions for 2011” where I wanted to quote tweets however Twitter was unable to find some the tweets when directly linked to. The plugin wasn’t able to display them and the end result was an error message was displayed instead of my tweet. You’ll see similar results if Twitter happens to either be down or under heavy load at the time you post your article. In such cases, keep refreshing until the tweet loads because once your site has managed to grab the tweet, the plugin will store it within your site’s cache.

Got a better plugin you use? Please tell me about it in the comments section below.